The Two Koreas, 1950–2008: An Unplanned Experiment in Economic Systems, the Carbon Footprint and Human Well-Being

Lately, North Korea has been very much in the news. Its population—or should I say, “captive population”—greets the passing of the baton from one ruler to another in the same spirit as “Kim is dead, long live Kim!” probably because they are unaware of the following satellite photos. Many readers here have probably encountered them previously.

Not only do the photographs illustrate the lack of economic development in North Korea, they show that it has one of the lightest carbon footprints in the world. And the various indicators of human well-being reflect that dark reality, as shown in the following table.

It wasn’t always thus. In the early 1950s, to the extent data are available, the two countries were about equal in terms of economic development and human well-being. In fact, in 1960, according to the World Bank data, North Korea’s life expectancy was marginally higher than in the South (55.2 yrs vs. 53.0 yrs). Of course, the North’s data may have been fluffed up a little bit by its government before being adopted by the World Bank, but I don’t know for sure.

But over time, South Korea’s freer economic system pulled it ahead. Then, the loss of external support because of the collapse of the Soviet Union turned North Korea into a basket case in the 1990s (see the following figure). Finally, the South also became more democratic and its economic and social systems became more transparent. The consequences are evident in the above photographs and the following figure.

Per capita GDP and per capita CO2 emissions, 1950-2008. Sources: Maddison (2008) and World Bank (2011).

The photographs and the figure are, among other things, also a stark warning of the dangers of excessive zeal in limiting a country’s carbon footprint.

you have to feel sorry for the people, they are kept utterly ignorant of what is happening in the World. This of course makes me even more angry when in Australia information is freely available but the population is too lazy to inform themselves. Oh and a tip for Andrew Wilke, why would you waste so much time on trying to protect an idiot that knows the machine they play is programmed to take money off you, Andrew! someone will remove the money from these people why waste your time?

To make things worse, look at the top picture — there *are* lights — they all are at the perimeter of the country, all facing hungrily outward. The interior of the country is dark, dark, dark. In a sane economy, the lights would either be distributed throughout the country, or at least be concentrated at various interior locations.

This is a testament to the inhuman scope of the moral and ethical crimes committed against the people of North Korea by their government. North Korea is the purest example of the opposite of capitalism in the world today – statism, collectivism, “social justice” and big government taken to their inevitable conclusion. This satellite photo is what I think of every time I hear the false claim “capitalists have no heart”.

The ruling entity in North Korea is kept in place by the civilized world. We feed his hungry with aid since short and stupid, (or whatever the new corpse wanted to call himself when he was alive) focused the entirety of his effort on being a malcontent and developing weapons. If the food dried up, all he had to do was rattle his cage and we (the civilized world) would pony up the goodies.

I’m not even convinced that North Korea ever attained fission in their bomb “tests.”

A year or so before the first test, maybe more, the Littlest Emperor very nearly died in an explosion that happened very soon after his train had passed through there. Rumors of an assassination attempt ran rampant. In all likelihood, it was just a run of the mill accident. Things like that happen when you produce large quantities of ammonium nitrate.

Ammonium nitrate is a key fertilizer, and very useful in an agricultural society. It’s also handy in the manufacture of explosives.

What follows is conjecture. (mine and possibly wrong)

This explosion probably gave the little emperor an idea. Take a mine, and pack it full of ANFO (the same stuff used in Oklahoma City). If it’s deep enough, and there is enough of it, it will look like a nuke. As far as I know, no radio active material was ever picked up by sensors from that first blast.

The world poo-pooed the fizzled nuke for this reason. So, blast number two incorporated radioactive material from the reactor(s) that he has. This material was subsequently detected in neighboring countries.

People still marvel at how you can go from no nuclear warhead capability to a highly advanced controlled small yield version in just one test. One test that ostensibly not achieve fission.

Am I wrong? It’s possible. I don’t know what isotopes were actually detected, and some of them are specific to the type of reaction (explosive verses reactor). That is the biggest weak-point of my idea.

So… the world is now better that the little emperor slowly decomposes. I seriously doubt that his replacement is going to be any better.

GeoLurking, just him having a reactor that can produce plutonium is enough of a threat. Plutonium is one of the most poisonous substances on the planet. Its lethal dose is unbelievable small. You don’t have to use it in a nuclear bomb for it to be a threat. A regular bomb that held a quantity of plutonium would be enough to aerosol the sample, spreading it over a significant area. Anyone who inhaled any of the aerosol would face possible death, and certainly illness. For years, this type of “nuclear” threat has been the bigger fear of anti-terrorist organizations rather than a full nuclear device. The general processing and machining needed to produce a nuclear device is much easier to detect than just someone acquiring a sample mass of plutonium.

Cry your eyes out for the Dear Leader. Cry with me!
Dead? No o no! Cruel world, undo this blow, this indignity! This outrage!
On his bier he lies now. He rests. The cooling fan wafts a solemn good-bye through the magnificent pompadour, the lion’s mane framing the Roman profile. Good-bye!
His Italian platform shoes? Empty—never again to click on the marble tiles of the Great Revolutionary Hall. Be still, yet set your heart aghast to the cruel stillness.
The Great Porn Collection stands idle on its extraordinarily long shelf. Asia Carrera, cry with me. Your honeyed skin will ne’er again fog a hero’s eyeglasses! Nikki Coxx, bow your head (but not too far) for your tush has danced its final jig on the People’s screen.
The exquisite, near-mint DVD of Titanic The Movie, barely watched for the tears it brought to that noble face—who will see you now? Who will cry over the boy wonder Di Caprio?
The world cries: re-run this life!
His heroic endorsement of the Dark Skies Initiative—the glorious twinkling above—THAT is his legacy.
The Horsehead Nebula is yours, O North Korean, o peasant, o soldier, to feast on with your naked eye.
No bowl of rice, no kim chee, no Bib Bam Bap, can match the rings of Saturn, outside the hut, by the hollow song of the rusted tractor.

GeoLurking, just him having a reactor that can produce plutonium is enough of a threat. Plutonium is one of the most poisonous substances on the planet.

All reactors in use create plutonium. In fact, by the time fuel rods are removed from a reactor, most of the fission is being supplied by plutonium. A fuel rod has only enough U-235 to run the fission reaction for a small amount of time. During that time, neutrons from the U-235 reaction change the natural U-238 to P-239 through the addition of a neutron. So the non-fissionable natural U-238 is converted to fissionable P-239. Interestingly, the longer you leave it in there, the more P-240 you produce. Sometimes P-239 doesn’t split, it absorbs a neutron and becomes P-240. P-240 is poison to a bomb, you don’t want any P-240 anywhere NEAR a bomb. P-240 is nearly impossible to separate from P-239, too.

The problem is that P-240 can undergo spontaneous fission and you don’t want something in a bomb that will undergo spontaneous fission.

Actually, if you read “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste” it will explain all of that:

Read that, have your kids read it, make sure your elected officials read it. This is what China is doing right now. Bill Gates is working with China right now on building fast neutron reactors for recycling fuel.

Some watermelon will find something beautiful to say about North Korea along the lines that its current condition is all the west’s fault. However it is clear from all the night satellite shots that there is a strong correlation between abundant energy and a society’s level of development.

Keith W. says: December 22, 2011 at 12:14 am Plutonium is one of the most poisonous substances on the planet
Wrong. I used to have a block of plutonium on my desk as a paperweight. Then some greenie nark official confiscated it because I tossed it in his direction. There are no obvious health effects of that ownership. We disposed of that poison myth in the 1970s, which suggests you have not kept up with your reading. Try some modern nerve gases or even natural anthrax or botulism vectors instead if you have to invent a ‘most poisonous’.
……………………………..
GeoLurking says: December 21, 2011 at 11:29 pm re ANFO explosions
Again, decades ago, possibly pre-1960s, geophysicists analysed seismic properties from large explosions, natural and otherwise. Nuclear had a distinctive fingerprint. It’s unlikely that the fertilizer in the bat cave would trick the system.

The idea that the UN could field ‘Green’ troops is a non starter. The UN can’t even keep the peace when asked let alone anything else. The people it would be trying to control, the West, are those that control the purse strings and even now the US is behind in its contributions and undoubtedly the UK is as well.

Truthseeker says:
December 21, 2011 at 11:12 pm
North Korea is clearly the CO2 free paradise that the IPCC want for the whole world. I know, lets move the UN to Pyongyang and let those bureaucrats enjoy what they want for everyone else.

Not quite, it’s what they want to impose upon everyone……………except themselves. Just as Kim Jong Il enjoyed his pies looking at the photos of him, & his son, yet I daresay “his people” would probably have preferred a bit more in handfuls of rice than their Beautiful Leader gave them!!!

Going on from GeoLurking and mayve a wee bit OT…..perhaps there is a God, but maybe not any ‘joined-up thinking’
Why…
Not far from me, in SW Scotland, the British Geological Society (BGS) have an ‘outpost’ measuring and recording seismic activity in all its guises. One of their ‘proudest’ achievements was recording a 1.6 Richter quake when PanAm 103 hit the ground. But, one of their important jobs, if not THE most important, is listening out for nuclear tests as they occur (or not) around the globe.
Of course this listening tackle is very sensitive and as a consequence, BGS have effectively (via objection(s) to the planning permission you need) banned the erection of all large wind turbines within a 50 km radius of their station.
Who’d have guessed, wind turbines sound like earthquakes or nuclear bomb tests?

GeoLurking says:
December 21, 2011 at 11:29 pm
“This is going to sound callous, but bear with me.
The ruling entity in North Korea is kept in place by the civilized world. We feed his hungry with aid since short and stupid, (or whatever the new corpse wanted to call himself when he was alive) focused the entirety of his effort on being a malcontent and developing weapons. If the food dried up, all he had to do was rattle his cage and we (the civilized world) would pony up the goodies.”

You are wrong. N Korea lost support by the Soviet Union but gained support by China (less subsidy than by the Soviets, but still, that’s what keeps the system from collapsing). N Korea is today a buffer zone for the Chinese empire.

Keith W. says:
December 22, 2011 at 12:14 am
“GeoLurking, just him having a reactor that can produce plutonium is enough of a threat. Plutonium is one of the most poisonous substances on the planet. Its lethal dose is unbelievable small. ”

This is disputed. There’s no obvious reason for this legendary toxicity of Plutonium; it should be expected to be about as toxic as similar heavy metals like Cadmium, plus, of course, being radioactive, it would add a cancer risk, but as its half life is way higher than that of say radioactive Iodine, it radiates accordingly less.

Shocking numbers in the table. Circa 3 tonnes of carbon to freeze through the winter and grow barely enough rice to survive the year. Ten tonnes gives an industrialised economy. Six times the infant death rate.

@John West. Do you think South Koreans should give thanks to the British and Australian forces who died defending South Korea from the north? Or do you think that they shouldn’t be thanked because they were not American?

“The photographs and the figure are, among other things, also a stark warning of the dangers of excessive zeal in limiting a country’s carbon footprint.”
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The Obama EPA is going to take how many mega watts of coal fired electricity offline???

The so-called “carbon footprint” was dreamed up as a way for western governments to make their taxpayers feel guilty enough to pay for their “sin” of generating “emissions” with an ever-lengthening list of carbon taxes. The latest example of this is the new EU carbon tax of about $20 added to every ticket for anyone flying through EU airspace from Jan 1st. This is on top of the Air Passenger Duty (APD Tax) already added to tickets bought in the UK which has been justified by the government as an environmental tax on “carbon emissions”.

The ruling entity in North Korea is kept in place by the civilized world.
Yes. The west covertly funded Russia, the soviets and communism from 1917 onwards. Why? It was an cover excuse to smash up competitor economies, such as Korea i.e. send the soviets in, then intervene and get the country to pay for your intervention, then parry the soviets rather than defeat them. result – half the country subdued by the soviets, the other half heavily in debt to western banks. Win.
This system was useful before the internet stock market made it more viable to subdue economies with a few mouse clicks ( the shooting of the east tiger economies in the 1990s ). The stoppage of funding for the soviet system was substantially due to the internet.
North Korea exists today to keep Korea malleable to western interests.

That´s the ideal world of the United Nations, the “Brave New World” of the beatnik, hippie, subterraneans´generation, who survived (nobody knows how) to the massive intake of stimulants, some of who still survive through having powdery white “aspirations”.
Their ideology was summarized in John Lennon´song “Imagine”:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world

You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

I think you could have added another thing to ….”economic systems, carbon footprints and human well-being…” namely, “environmental health”
I sometimes wonder if the concept of environmental health is actually meaningful, but for the sake of argument I assume that it does – land and life is more productive and can be said to thrive more with more environmental health.
With that addition, it is clear that the poverty of North Korea is one of the things that creates environmental degradation along with its two brothers-in-arms, oppressive government and an absence of private ownership. I’m biased, but if I compare the environmental paradise in which I live (the green and pleasant land called England) I notice that we are wealthy, we have a democratically elected un-oppressive government, and everything and everywhere in the country is looked after – someone has responsibility for it, manages it and cares for it – not least because they may profit from its health. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is something that afflicts undemocratic, dispossessed people, and yet it is an unobserved irony that environmentalists wants to restrict not only wealth and freedom, but also private ownership.
North Korea is a ‘living’ example of what those three paths will lead to.

It looks like the official story on the death of Kim Jong-il is being questioned:

thestar . com [Toronto Star]
How did Kim Jong-il really die? Spy agency doubts official story“South Korean spymasters, stung by being caught unaware when North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died, are challenging the official version of his death.”

It is true the people of N. Korea are so starved they do not weigh enough to leave a foot print.

The late Kim, who was well fed, had his own lane reserved 24/7 for his personal use when being driven about town so there would be no need to clear traffic even though there was little traffic day or night.

Dictators always take care of themselves very well giving themselves special privilege and ripping off the wealth of the nation for themselves. And there is something strange about people with un-restrained power, the more they have the more they want to use and abuse.

There is also something about free people who have to be suppressed to prevent them from advancing themselves, and that is where the climate alarmists and willing politicians and regulators come into the picture to save a free people from themselves and from their freedom.

There can be no doubt that RNK, in it’s present state, serves the purposes of China. It must serve the west also, as we have enabled the government, thru aid to sustain the population, while all resources are diverted to enable the military/elite. This is exactly the plan the UN would like globally, where all resources are controlled and delegated by them.

Like all organizations, once they obtain control and power, it is only a matter of time, until hijacked by some psychopath. Society has never learned to avoid psychopathic leaders and our governments are designed to provide easy access for such. They are the world’s leaders, every single one.

Btw: plutonium is not really dangerous, until configured such that neutron emission rises exponentially to detonation. It is a great tool, if you are a psychopath. The hard part is obtaining 13 pounds of plutonium. After that, any idiot psychopath, can construct one, as long as physical size, and maximum yield, is not important. GK

Some watermelon will find something beautiful to say about North Korea along the lines that its current condition is all the west’s fault. However it is clear from all the night satellite shots that there is a strong correlation between abundant energy and a society’s level of development.

I’ll give it a go: The best thing about North Korea is that it is an icon of communism. Everybody knows the worst place to live in the world would be N. Korea, even with their horrible “dear leader” now dead and gone. As a consequence, anyplace else would be more beautiful. And that’s a very sad thing to say considering the potential of their humble people (they’re closely related to S. Koreans, of course) and the natural beauty of their peninsular nation.

Willis
Re: “Then, the loss of external support because of the collapse of the Soviet Union turned North Korea into a basket case in the 1990s (see the following figure).”

The primary driver was the loss of subsidized diesel fuel compounded by North Korea’s lack of hard currency earnings to purchase fuel on the open market. This gives an extremely hard lesson on the consequences of fuel shortages.

WARNING: Fuel importing countries are currently on a similar though slower track.
Global oil consumption has exceeded discoveries since 1980.
Alternatives are NOT being developed as fast enough to prevent a downturn.Lloyd’s of London is warning of global fuel shortages starting between 2012 and 2015.Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Industry Lloyd’s 360 Risk Insight, Chapham House

These photos are clearly not representative of the true comforts of life in the NKorean capital. UV photography would clearly show the people warming themselves by the campfires lighted in the upper stories of the high rise apartment buildings in Pyongyang. So there.

To get a flavour of what happened during the 90’s when the Soviets dropped support you should read “Nothing to Envy” by Barbara Demick when 20% of the population died through starvation.
I suppose we should be grateful that they did their bit to “save the planet” by reducing the amount CO2 “pollution”.

Also of note … North Korea has been completely deforested due to government-mandated planting of marginal land and wholesale chopping of remaining trees for fuelwood. This explains why they have recurring problems with flooding! In contrast South Korea has run one of the world’s most successful reforestation campaigns.

Even the figure of 3.2 tons/capita in N Korea paints a misleadingly genourous picture, when you consider that most of that “per capita” footprint is socialised rather than privatised. In other words, it is largely the result of the states military apparatus, state factories and state bureaucracies.

Once the workers go home at the end of the day, they leave their per capitas behind.

“Truthseeker says:
December 21, 2011 at 11:12 pm
North Korea is clearly the CO2 free paradise that the IPCC want for the whole world. I know, lets move the UN to Pyongyang and let those bureaucrats enjoy what they want for everyone else.”

Yeah,.

The UN would probably like to model the World on N.Korea for their Agenda 21 & CO2 AGW/CC causes.

While us the Peasants would be going around pushing/pulling carts or riding bicycles for transport, etc. The UN bureaucrats and their ilk would be driving around in their limos.!

You should probably be a little more specific in use of alternative because I think most of the world, or at least enough of it to cause unending confusion, considers “alternative” fuels to be those which aren’t produced from fossil fuel.

“We need alternative fuels with EROI >> 4 to survive.”

We need fuel cheaper than oil at $100/bbl to survive and prosper that’s for sure. The recession is going to last for decades without energy dropping in price to $30/bbl equivalent or below. At 3x the price there’s a lot of downgrading of lifestyles that has to work its way through the system before the books balance.

“I expect synfuels from solar thermal will eventually have the highest EROI and lowest cost.”

As you probably from our associations over the years I think you’re dead wrong there. Solar thermal is a small boondoggle trying to become a major disaster. First of all it doesn’t produce liquid fuels. Nukes aren’t terribly cost efficient, about twice as much as combined cycle natural ggas, so if electricity was the problem we could solve that and keep a respectable ROI. The problem is infrastructure. We don’t have distribution infrastructure for anywhere near enough additional electricity to put a dent in liquid fuel use. In some cases such as commercial trucking and air transporation electricity is about as useful as tits on a tomcat as there is no known means of acheiving the portable energy density those applications must have.

Synthetic biology is the answer. Scatter some tiny seeds for a geneticially engineered organism over an acre of marginal land like what’s in the Texas panhandle and what a solid green mat grow without help that has a capillary/veinous system in it that collects vegetable oil into taps that go straight into waiting tanker trucks or something like that. It would be suitable for immediate use in unmodified diesel engines, boilers, and furnaces and is tankable, storable, and transportable with existing infrastructure.

This will be off the shelf technology sooner than anything else. Mark my words. The neat thing is we’re not talking a cost/effective replacement for fossil fuels but such a huge reduction in the cost of energy it’ll bring about a whole new era of civilization. Probably the biggest obstacle is all the powerful applecarts that would be upset by virtually free abundant energy. How many energy companies will have to find a new schtick? They won’t go away quietly is my bet.

Russia intentionally lowered support during the 90s in order to further impoverish the North Koreans and make them, ultimately, even more dependent. It’s a strategy. Sick, for sure, but it is a strategy. They did not want to see an outcome like Germany directly on their border.

BTW – the Kims are not real native Koreans, they are ethnic Koreans of Russian background, installed by Stalin.

My apology for the last. I missed the “synfuel” part of solar thermal. That’s still a boondoggle. The problem with solar is still a biggie even if you’re using the heat to assist in fractionation or some other means of producing liquid fuels from biomass. The problem is sunlight is too dilute and requires great cost and ongoing maintenance in any concentration schemes to turn it from low quality heat to high quality heat. With biomass I’m assuming you’re talking agricultural waste which must still be collected and transported to where the conversion takes place. It also accelerates degradation of soils when it isn’t plowed under to lighten the soil and replace nutrients. That’s a non-starter almost as much as ethanol. The only real answer is a bioengineered organism that does the job all in one step on marginal soil using brackish or unpottable waste water. It can fix its own nitrogen and pretty much need no care or replishment of nutruients as hydrocarbon fuels need contain nothing more than oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon which use up only air and water.

Within 30 years we’ll need laws that limit how much CO2 can be removed from the air because it’s a universal ready source of carbon and with carbon you can build all sorts of useful things from diamond to pencils and liquid fuels and everything in between. Mark my words. Atmospheric carbon will become a limited resource in the not too distant future. Both of may live to see it if we’re average-lucky.

Stunning example for a earth sensitive way to live. CO2 output is really low. Not even the concentration camps are emitting light. Why shouldnt be the nezt meeting of the AGW-circus be in the development model of the world. If critical minds come and speak out, …

Look at poor South Korea with all that consum terror. They, we all have a lot to learn.

“… decades ago, possibly pre-1960s, geophysicists analysed seismic properties from large explosions, natural and otherwise. Nuclear had a distinctive fingerprint. It’s unlikely that the fertilizer in the bat cave would trick the system…”

Yeah, I’m aware of that. But a large underground blast and an underground nuclear blast produce near identical compressive waveforms. These are very distinct from strike/slip and have no double couple. (compressive axis and extensional axis) Likewise, the waveform does not look like a piston movement (upper material dropping and lower material flowing up to the more vacant area, such as would be seen in a ring faulted caldera)

The only way to get a read on what is what, is on the differences in the shape of the pulse. This requires some pretty significant resolution and a really good model of what the crust is like in that area. (wave speeds).

And where were the “tests?” In a poorly explored (seismically) mountainous region where you have more reflectors and material interfaces than you can shake a stick at.

This obfuscates any seismic signal in the area. I’m gonna stick with my gut feel on this one.

Dave Springer says:
December 22, 2011 at 12:05 pm
“Nukes aren’t terribly cost efficient, about twice as much as combined cycle natural ggas, so if electricity was the problem we could solve that and keep a respectable ROI. The problem is infrastructure. We don’t have distribution infrastructure for anywhere near enough additional electricity to put a dent in liquid fuel use. In some cases such as commercial trucking and air transporation electricity is about as useful as tits on a tomcat as there is no known means of acheiving the portable energy density those applications must have.”

The perfect place for that brainwashed English politician Mr Huhne to go on holiday. He can then see at first hand what the UK will look like after he has built all those windmills, all £150,000,000,000 of them.

It takes enormous amounts of cheap electricity to make those lights. In 2008, B. Obama told the San Francisco Examiner: “Under my administration, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket”. Since getting elected, he has worked on this diligently. Among the first actions of his appointment to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was to shut down the only US power plant waste repository being developed (Yucca Mountain). Makes nuke power more expensive and less desirable in this country.

Dave Springer
Re: “Solar thermal is a small boondoggle trying to become a major disaster. . . .even if you’re using the heat to assist in fractionation or some other means of producing liquid fuels from biomass.”
The problem with biomass is very low efficiency of ~2-3% giving $50/ton biomass etc.
I said solar THERMAL, not biofuels (though solar thermal can help biofuels).
Discouraged pessimists do provide the valuable service of reality checks in evaluating the commercial configurations. While you are welcome to your opinion, that need not constrain finding commercial solutions. Some clues:

Dan in California
Re: “Under my administration, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket”.
Our Dear Comrade (“O”) is actively working to enforce his dictat to conform our standard of living to that achieved in North Korea. See:EPA Tries To Pull a Fast One

The Mercury and Air Toxic Standards for Power Plants rule would make electricity generation far more complex and expensive, especially in the eastern half of the United States. It would require the closure of many coal and oil fired power plants, and placement of emissions control equipment on others. Forty-five percent of American electricity is produced by coal.
Maximum Achievable Control Technology means that plants and boilers have to use the most stringent methods possible to get the heavy metals out of the air, even if these methods cost billions and the benefits are worth far less-as is the case with the new utility rule. That’s why many plants will have to close. . . .
“If the enormous public benefits EPA predicts from these mercury standards were real, they would justify the cost to Americans of almost $11 billion per year. Unfortunately, they are not.” . . .
EPA estimates its new rules would cost households and businesses $10 billion a year in 2016. Industry groups have estimated the costs at $40 billion to $120 billion for full compliance, with many older coal and oil-fired plants forced to close. Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Michigan are the hardest-hit, because they are home to the oldest plants with the fewest emissions controls.

These additional costs would come on top of those to be imposed, starting around 2015, by EPA’s other planned standards for carbon, water, coal ash, and particulates.

Those wanting a rational energy policy, please contact your legislators with this article!

David Springer
re solar “requires great cost and ongoing maintenance in any concentration schemes to turn it from low quality heat to high quality heat.”
To quantify the solar costs see NREL’s Solar Advisor Module (SAM) (That can also give clues as to how to reduce the costs.)

A similar unintended social experiment was done with Germany at the end of WWII. When split into East and West with one under Communism and one under (moderately free market) capitalism it took a wall to keep people inside the eastern half while the western half prospered. While Eastern Germany didn’t have the extreme poverty of North Korea its economy, the best of the Eastern Bloc, was a pale shadow of the West.

If you have a look at the GDP/CO₂ curves, it turns out that even before the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis, although North Korea had plenty of energy, its use was terribly inefficient. And after the crisis, unlike other countries, it could never recover.

Therefore what we see here is not a sui generis low carbon economy, but a busted one.

Dr. Jerry Pournelle often says, accurately, that cheap, plentiful energy is the key to freedom and prosperity.

We have the good fortune to be governed (in fact, ruled) by an administration whose express agenda is to restrict the supply of energy and increase its cost. And an educated elite that cheers every action that they take to advance it.

For both, North Korea is a ‘beacon, shining in the wilderness’. Metaphorically, of course.

“I expect producing fuel below $50/bbl equivalent is eventually doable.
It requires alot of “dreaming in detail” – otherwise known as innovative engineering, but where there is a will, there is a way.”

I wouldn’t disagree that you might get there eventually with solar thermal. The problem with that is, David, that direct production of hydrocarbon fuel by synthetic organisms will reach $5/bbl before solar thermal can get to $50/bbl.

You are certainly entitled to a different opinion but it would be poorly informed opinion. I don’t think you realize how close the synthetic biology solution is to reality nor how far from reality lies anything that can compete with it. Mark my words.

I’m not sure if you fully appreciate the inertia behind biofuel. Tens of billions of dollars annually are already moving through the end-to-end supply chain for ethanol in the United States alone. Ten billion gallons/year of ethanol is blended into the gasoline sold in the U.S. There are almost 50 different models of vehicles of all kinds from cars to suvs to trucks with E85 engines either standard or optional.

The only thing that’s going to change is the source and cost of the ethanol and the amount being consumed. The source will shift to production on land that is not arable using water that is not potable. This will be accomplished with genetically modified organisms. The cost will plummet because there will be very little of value on the input side of the supply chain including labor. The infrastructure is already in place. As the price for ethanol falls and price of fossil oil rises E85 engines will be offered on more and more vehicles until it’s standard for all new engines. They aren’t a costly option to begin with. The same story goes for diesel. Fuel oil can be directly produced by GM organisms at pennies per gallon and can be blended into fossil derived diesel just as ethanol is blended into gasoline.

You write like someone with a vested interest in certain solar technologies.

Just for the record I have no vested interest in any of this outside of a desire to see my electricity and fuel bills go down instead of up. How that happens matters not a bit to me and I don’t really give a damn whether it’s carbon neutral, carbon free, or carbon city. I’m convinced that in the not too distant future atmospheric CO2 will be seen as a valuable commodity and we’ll be wanting more of it than we can remove without dire consequences to primary producers in the food chain. Atmospheric CO2 will be our carbon source for production of all manner of durable goods as well as for our carbon-neutral fuels. There will be a real need for laws to limit how much can be removed for the manufacture of durable goods. How ironic given the prevailing and mistaken mindset today of needing laws to limit how much can be added.